It’s been quite busy in my life since I last posted! It seems that’s always the way though, isn’t it? Part of what I’ve been so busy working on is what I’d like to show you in this post: three whole new product lines!

Well, to be strictly honest, one is brand new and the other has been around for a bit but I’m just getting around to blogging about it. I’ll start with the one I’m most excited about and I think you guys will be excited about too!

I have long been on the quest for the perfect skin serum; something completely natural, vegan, with ingredients which not only help my skin in the short term, which prevents premature signs of aging, but is also extremely gentle, healing and will only make your skin healthier and healthier the longer you use it! I’d narrowed in on several key oils that I knew my skin responded to well so I decided to create my own custom blend! And, as it turns out, the oils are all incredibly good for your hair, nails; basically every single part of your body!

In addition to all that, you also have the option of having vitamin C serum added to your oil blend! Vitamin C acts something like a bouncer for your skin; it keeps all the bad stuff out. Anything that might try to sneak it, it finds and throws it out on its ass! I have not been able to find reliable information on what vitamin C serum might do for your hair; until I do, I can’t recommend its use in hair, but it’s fabulous for your skin!

My exact blend is proprietary, but I can tell you that my blend contains vegan squalene oil, argan oil and rosehip seed oil (and vitamin C serum if you choose). I won’t bog this post down even more highlighting exactly what INCREDIBLE things each of these oils do, but I’ll give you a brief highlight! My serum:

Is all natural, vegan, completely cruelty-free, fragrance-free and pure, with no fillers.

Is extremely gentle, suitable for all skin types and (despite it being an oil) actually fights acne!

Is incredibly good for your hair and scalp! It can be used as a flyaway-tamer, added to your conditioner or styling product, or a few drops can be used on their own for a light hold (I love using it this way myself).

I think you all know that I’m a big fan of the site Fiverr! It’s a wonderful site where people sell products (mostly digital) and services of ALL kinds – all starting at, you guessed it, $5. What you probably don’t know is that I have several of my own gigs on Fiverr!

One secret trick of mine is using layers of light textures! I use them in almost every single image I create these days. They can be a bold or subtle wash of color, which helps lend a dreamy, ethereal, beautiful look to your photos! I have a LOT of these textures which I have all shot myself, so while the base gig starts at $5, if you want more, you can get up to 25 at a time!

sarahallegra.com

sarahallegra.com

sarahallegra.com

I’ve been a Reiki practitioner for a number of years now. It’s a really beautiful and powerful energy healing modality which does not even require the person I’m working on to be in the same room as me. Pure, healing energy knows no boundaries of time and space! I’ve had wonderful results from this as you can see by the reviews, and I can also attest to having had incredible feedback from people not on Fiverr! I offer Reiki sessions for people (yourself, a friend, a child, anyone whose permission I have to send energy to), or I can send it to the animal (wild or domestic) of your choosing. Animals respond very well to energy healing!

Now that I am an officially certified Unicorn Healing™ Practitioner, I can also offer Unicorn healings, again for yourself (or any person who has given permission) or animals, wild or domestic. Unicorn healing is like nothing else I’ve worked with or done before. It has a very different feel than Reiki energy; neither is better than the other, they’re just different. The best way to describe it is that Reiki feels more earthy and grounded, while Unicorn energy feels much more celestial and divine. I have been COMPLETELY blown away by the incredible changes I’ve seen in myself and others, often after just one treatment!

Both kinds of energy healing work to restore balance and vitality to every part of you; mind, body, emotion and soul. By its own nature, it can never harm and will always work for the recipients’ highest good. I highly, highly recommend trying one of them, it can be an absolutely life-changing experience!

Last for my Fiverr gigs, I now have an oracle card reading gig! I tested this with both friends and strangers before I decided to start charging, even just $5, to make sure it would be worth peoples’ money. Boy, was that an overwhelming success! I really enjoy doing oracle card readings, especially with the beautiful deck my sweet friend Andrea gave me! Got a question? It doesn’t matter what kind of question it is, the cards will help reveal the answer to you!

Lastly, this is not a new product, but it has a whole new price! My online self-discovery-through-photography course Introspective: An Online Quest is currently hosted on Udemy.com. Udemy recently changed its pricing structure and capped all its classes at $40, which is WELL below what Introspective is worth. However, until I figure out a better way to deal with a host for the class, I’m happy to let people get in on this deal! Prior to this, Introspective was priced at $75 for the entire 8-week course, so enjoy getting almost 50% off until I have time to deal with this! 🙂

Here’s a brief description of what Introspective is all about: Introspective is an eight-week, on-line course in which you will use your camera to explore your inner self. Each week, you will receive assignments challenging you to delve into your secrets, fears and joys. This is not a class about camera basics such as f-stops, apertures and shutter speeds…although links to helpful technical articles will be provided. This class is about digging deep into your core and capturing what you find there in photographs.

So there you guys go! Enjoy, and please feel free to leave feedback on any of these!

Last summer, I had recently watched some of the BBC’s episodes of Life, their truly excellent series on all kinds of wildlife. I was watching it while I edited other images (I rarely watch TV without doing a second activity, unless we’re talking about shows like True Detective, Breaking Bad, Boardwalk Empire, Rectify, etc, which all demand my full attention) but my editing suddenly halted when this segment came on.

I remember backing it up and watching the whole piece again, mesmerized, deeply touched and saddened by such complete, beautiful devotion from any creature to another. As I watched it a third time, I knew a photo was going to come out of it somehow… it was resonating too deeply with me for anything else to happen.

Now, as to how the medieval elements worked themselves in… I can only give you guesses since I’m not really sure how my brain made the jump myself. I know that part of it had to do with wanting to give her eight “tentacles” of some kind (which made its way into her hair) and wanting to give her a pouch to carry her eggs in. For some reason, I thought of a kirtle, a medieval garment which lasted for several centuries. The kind I was picturing were from, I believe, earlier on in the medieval period and looked more like what we might think of as over-dresses or fancy aprons.

A red kirtle from a modern pattern by Burda.

Researching medieval garments inevitably led to medieval hair… images like these set my brain whirling.

You can see how the braided and wrapped hair, along with beautiful headdresses leaked into my character.

As usual, I wasn’t sure how I was going to do this when I started into it.

I had a longish, dark brown wig which I’d bought very cheaply quite a while ago. When it arrived, I realized why it had been so cheap; it was already snarled and tangled before I’d even taken it out of the package. I halfheartedly attempted to work the same wide-tooth comb I use for my own often snarled and tangly hair and quickly realized it was a futile endeavor. I tossed the wig into the back of the closet and mostly forgot about it.

When this project came up, I remembered it though. Even though it poofed up like a drying poodle as I combed it, that would work in this case, since I’d be wrapping it up and looping it around. I spent most of one afternoon just combing it out – not detangling it, mind you; there was never any hope of this wig being tangle-free. My best hope was to get it to the point where I could separate it into eight segments. It took all the strength in my arms and they were very unhappy with me for the next few days, but I managed to do it.

In the meantime, I had discovered arm knitting, which I found I could do without a) using much brain power, b) quickly c) without using much muscle power and d) it had very pretty and interesting results. The resulting squares and shapes I made from the looping yarn had such a beautiful, organic look, almost like a coral reef or some other under-sea plant/creature, that it felt completely at home with an aquatic-inspired creature.

After the combing session, I put the wig away for a day or two. I brought it out again after my arms had regained a little strength. Of course this also meant that it had had a couple days left completely on its own without any outside help to start tangling again, so I spent a little time re-combing it to get it back to a manageable state. I quickly arm-knit a band of yarn which would form the circlet of my headdress and made sure it would fit.

I put the circlet of yarn back on top of the hair and began crisscrossing the yarn (which was a beautiful, slightly metallic variegated blend of soft pinks, blues, lavenders and silvers) over the different segments, using liberal help from my glue gun to keep everything in check. Each segment was attached back up to the main part of the circlet after its crisscrossing was done.

The two front, face-framing sections of hair were left for last. I added some looping pieces of yarn between the other segments to make it more headdress-like. The front segments got crisscrossed with their own lengths of yarn and were then attached to the very back of the circlet, forming two large loops on either side of the face, with hair tentacles hanging underneath them.

Then was the fun part: beads! I raided my bead stash, with an eye toward pieces from a very elaborate headdress I’d made which had recently died, spilling beads all over the floor. I knew there were some really cool pieces which I’d used for it, so I repurposed them again in this piece. I didn’t want it to be overwhelmingly be-jeweled and sparkly, just enough bling to make the character look a bit important; perhaps some kind of royalty.

Moving on to her dress, I had a high-necked, sleeveless, pink chiffon dress from Ebay which I’d gotten for little more than a song. Pink isn’t a color I’m usually drawn to that much, but since the original octopus was pink, my character was going to be pink too. I kind of eyeballed the general shape of a kirtle from ivory tulle; a lot was going to happen to it and since it was so light and transparent, it didn’t need to be perfectly symmetrical.

I free-styled a yoke for the kirtle with more arm knitting and added some cap sleeves (which are only visible in some of the images unfortunately). One thing I was finding with the arm knitting was that is is EXTREMELY forgiving. Arm you within an atom bomb’s range of what you were going for? Then it will probably work!

To unify the costume and also enhance the organic, oceanic feel, I arm knitted a piece for the bottom of the kirtle, basically a large triangle, and two smaller, upside-down triangles for either side of the egg pouch. I left several yarn strings loose from the pouch triangles which would be used to tie the kirtle behind the back of the dress, just like a regular apron.

The eggs were leftover from a shoot I did with Paul Telfer as the Sleeper’s Sentinel. I’d had to buy a dozen of the super-large plastic eggs so I had PLENTY to use for other shoots! I kept these fairly simple since there would be a lot going on visually in the images; I started with spray-painting a base coat of a semi-metallic light gold color and added flecks of bronze-black to make them look more like real eggs. Repeat until they look right. I knew I’d only need five or six eggs, since that was as many as would fit in the pouch I’d made so I didn’t waste any time painting extra eggs.

I did do one thing to just one egg though… I found a nail and a hammer and while the egg was still in two pieces, I hammered a hole through from the inside out. Some sharp knives, pliers and more hammering later, I’d created what looked like a fracture in the egg from a chick inside starting to hatch. Eggs = done!

I’d had my faithful model Dedeker Winston in mind for this character the whole time. I usually cast characters in the same way I create them, just by what “feels right.” I had not consciously remembered it, but it turned out there was a really wonderful real-world reason to have Dedeker play the octopus-mother caring for her eggs. Dedeker has been an egg donor many times to couples who are unable to have children on their own. In fact, one family has two children, both from Dedeker’s eggs, and they just requested a third! It’s very unusual for a family to have so many children from the same donor, but I think it’s really lovely that all of their children will be linked in this extra way. And clearly Dedeker produces really fantastic babies! 🙂 Once I remembered that, it felt truly serendipitous that we were shooting this character together.

I knew that my wig was several shades darker than Dedeker’s hair and I had a couple thoughts on how to deal with it. I knew she had a dark brown wig of her own which we could layer under mine, or we could totally cover all of her hair with a wig cap. In the end though, she simply twirled her hair into a low bun, I set the wig on top of her head and since there was so much going on with the hair, it looked completely natural and blended right in. If you looked closely, you could see that some of the hairs on her forehead were a bit lighter than the rest of her head, but I matched them up in about 30 seconds in Photoshop. Sometimes the simplest method is the best!

We set out on a morning last summer to capture these shots of the character I’ve dubbed the Pink Mother. We got started early and the sun was already blazing; it promised to be a miserably hot day but at the moment it was still pleasant. I started shooting Dedeker in a dryer, dustier, yellower scene and led her along a path which gradually got greener and lusher, mirroring the octopus’ journey to find the perfect environment for her eggs to be born into. The color pallet moved from warm and vivid to cool and less saturated, especially in regards to the Pink Mother herself. As she nears death, the paler she becomes until the last shot, where she is very white.

She sacrificed everything she had for her eggs. She loved them, cared for them, caressed them. She journeyed over countless miles to find a safe, green place for them to be born. Though it cost her everything, she never hesitated. And, it seems, her journey was worth it. The cracks in the eggs prove her right. They were brought forth from the deepest love there is, and that can only be the best start to these new beings.

So thank you to Dedeker for being my medieval octopus mother and letting me share your story about your own eggs! And thank you for trusting my vision even if it seemed questionable at the time 😉 You were the perfect, purest-loving mother to those babies!

And now enjoy the full images, some detail shots and behind-the-scenes captures!

One of the unexpected perks of being a photographer who often shoots in natural settings is that I have been able to witness some examples of incredible beauty and wonder that I never would have seen if I wasn’t out in it so frequently. One example of this is the sudden winter that fell over a nearby forest in the middle of summer. The forest is rich with a certain kind of tree which apparently reproduces in much the same way a dandelions does; growing a downy, fluffy seed which the wind carries far and wide. I have searched and searched, but I still have no idea what the name of the tree is; if you know, please tell me! Regardless, the result of the trees was that huge sections of the forest was covered in a magical “snow.” I couldn’t have asked for a setting more perfect for DreamWorld.

Naturally, I leaped into photographic action.

The first photo of the series featured Dedeker amidst the snow trees. She carried such a feeling of wonder and awe, much the same as I had felt the first time I saw the snowy landscape.

All Of Winter In A Day

All Of Winter In A Day – detail

All Of Winter In A Day – detail

All Of Winter In A Day – detail

The second photo I created was with Katie. I decided there should be someone who ruled this forever-winter corner of DreamWorld, a benevolent being who would keep things always winter, but it would be a spring-like winter full of life and growth. I’m sure a lot of my fascination with this idea has to do with the brutal Los Angeles summer we all go through every year, and the fact that heat makes all of my symptoms much worse. I dread summer every year, and I long for a place where summer could never reach, so the Snow Saint was created. I wanted her to have a semi-religious quality, something that hinted at a spirituality as well as power over nature. Katie easily embodied all of these elements at once. The Snow Saint looks like a queen, like someone to be revered, but also someone you could approach and who would hear your supplications.

Where Summer Dares Not Tread – detail

Where Summer Dares Not Tread – detail

Where Summer Dares Not Tread – detail

And yes, on both occasions my models and I were shaking “snow” off our clothes and out of our hair for hours, but it was well worth it 🙂